Graham Smith - Jank (Page 8)

20 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The sun is shining in Brighton, which means my appetite for going outside has returned and my appetite for playing games has greatly dimmed. Luckily I have no available friends nearby this weekend, and so I shall be inside playing videogames anyway.

What of you, our attractive and popular readers? Tell us if and what you're playing in the comments below.

Beavers on ziplines, some of which are robots, float over farms full of lush crops. — I hope these beavers have union protections.

Timberborn

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and water physics, allowing you to construct vast, hydroelectrically-powered cities of lumber with your populace of beavers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the art and tutorial, adds tools to automate the operation of your city, and smooths the creation of mods. Top stuff.

Some peasants cross a bridge to enter through a stone gate and into a city surrounded by trees and a wooden fence. — Pencils were so big in medieval times.

Going Medieval

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and deep citizenry management, allowing you to construct vast cities of stone with your populace of needy settlers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the tutorial, adds new endgame objectives among other content, and smooths the management of your many workers. Top stuff.

Lots of baseball player headshots littered in formation across a baseball field. — Pure

18 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Lost And Found Co. review (of the YouTube videos I watched alongside it)

It could have lost the plot, and maybe I have

Lost And Found Co. is Where's Wally with a mouse pointer. You peer into orthographic worlds and you long to live within them: bustling city streets filled with colourful stores, buskers, and cute cats; a cluttered house that looks like it's fallen out of the pages of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Tokyo Style; a park, a jungle, a swamp, a convenience store, an island bar, a cat cafe.

The game's objective is that you find a given list of items in each location to bring notoriety back to a shrine goddess and win a popularity contest against an evil corporate president. My objective, however, is to dissociate of an evening while watching YouTube videos on a second screen. So let's appraise Lost And Found Co. in how it enables my goals.

Video 1: Episode 43 by Quest For The Best

I haven't watched this anime and never will.

Second screens have been a commonplace part of PC gaming for decades, and today people refer to certain releases as "podcast games". It's certainly always been a regular part of how I play games. I used to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent television while

15 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and

13 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Give me your comments, I need them to live

This week felt like a merciful relief when compared to the machinegun of new releases at the beginning of March. Still, perhaps your hunger is not yet sated. Perhaps you wish for more new games, games about mending teapots, making spells, and murdering monsters.

What a coincidence, here are some games that meet those specific criteria. Let us know what you are playing in the comments down below.

How about a cosy back-to-basic life sim but it's about moving away from streaming services in favour of neatly maintaining the tags on your locally stored mp3 collection?

Piece By Piece

Repair items for animal folk by jigsawing them back together, then use the money you make to decorate your shop. There's some obvious Animal Crossing inspiration here (the fonts, the UI, the character designs), but gardening and painting aside, it seems much more focused on the soothing loop of shop management.

What a magnificent beast. Let's kill it.

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

I've never managed to get into a Monster Hunter game, but the Stories spin-off series seems like my most likely route in at this point. Twisted Reflection looks like it

11 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Project TurboBlast's vehicles have wheels, but it's an antigrav racer in spirit

You know where you stand with a name like TurboBlast

It's difficult to find arcade racers where the handling isn't either mundane by dint of hewing too closely to ancient inspirations, or too fussy or difficult by dint of having been designed by sickos who are much better at these games than I am.

Project TurboBlast hits a sweet spot, judging by its demo, from its on-the-nose name to its F-Zero-on-wheels boost-happy racing style. "Don't blink," the announcer yells at the beginning of each final lap, and I don't think I did.

The music is great in this trailer, too.

Let me clarify "F-Zero-on-wheels". TurboBlast's tracks are wide, twisty, often suspended above an abyss, and covered in glowing boost pads, like every antigrav racer you've ever played including the likes of WipeOut. Your actual vehicles are on wheels, however, both cars or bikes, and you'll need to drift around every corner like in a Mario Kart or a Victory Heat Rally, one of the better arcade racers from recent years.

TurboBlast really is all about managing your turboblast. Aside from the boosts littered across the track, you have a slowly re-filling boost meter

10 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith News

Sprawl Zero wants to take the FPS back to 2005

Some of us never left

I'm not a big fan of using modern internet phrases when writing about games. You know what I mean: "Hollow Knight's vibes are immaculate" or "I'm Balatro pilled", that sort of thing. It dates your writing within about fifteen minutes, and it pales in comparison to the power of original language you chose yourself.

Anyway first-person shooter Sprawl Zero appears to be Ravenmaxxing.

"Y2K is back" says a loading bar at the start of the trailer, and then "Reloading 2005" just before the liquid drum-and-bass drops for a combat montage of catching bullets, bum-sliding, and throwing physics barrels at enemies. At several points the player punches a man so hard they burst. This is a game made by people who I'd bet have seen Ghost In The Shell, Akira and probably at least one OVA, and who have played not only Raven Software's Singularity, but probably also Ritual's Sin and Monolith's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. They have probably seen The Matrix more times than they can count.

All of which is excellent. We've had several years now of "boomer shooter" renaissance, with developers trying to recreate the Id

08 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

WYSPTW or wapwapwapwap for short

Videogames are intensifying! The first week of March has delivered more games I want to play than any other so far this year, and I haven't finished with all the Next Fest demos I want to play yet. Please, please slow down, we are but three sickly men with a small blog.

Here are just some of the games you should be playing this weekend, but remember to tell us all the other games you are playing in the comments below.

A crowded pier dense with shops, a bar, a ship, and dozens of people, rendered in a colourful orthographic style. — Oh, it's a fucking wonderland, is it? Delightful as shit, are we?

Lost And Found Co.

I played the demo of Lost And Found Co. several years ago and had checked in on it intermittently since. Its release this week was still a total surprise. This is a Where's Wally-style hidden object adventure that excites me, mainly, for the warmth and detail of its art style. Sooner or later I'll be queuing up some podcasts and spending hours finding miscellany in its Hergécore dioramas.

Two adventurers stand by a chest. "Not a mimic", reads a sign above it. — This isn't by one of the original Disco Elysium developers, mercifully.

Esoteric Ebb

What if you took many of the RPG systems and writerly flourishes of Disco Elysium and